Fresh from a test run in the wilds of Canada and an Image comics mini-series, Sky Pirates of Neo Terra tells the story of a world where disparate tribes maintain peace through glidewing racing, which is as good an excuse for a cross-platform online multiplayer racing game as I've ever heard.

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It's a little Skies of Arcadia if you ask me, but I don't mind. Featuring the gorgeous artwork of Camilla d'Errico, master of the big-eyed anime girls, the game gives players across Facebook, iOS and Android a chance to battle it out on eight different courses as eight different characters from the series, or create their own character that looks an awful lot like the others but with different hair and hues.

The draw here is the racing, blazing fast whether played on a social network or mobile phone. It's a battle racer, with power-ups and boosts and such, controlled with arrow keys or touch screens, depending. Up to six real players can enter a race in real-time, though so far my races seem to have one or two additional realbies (my word), with the rest of the slots filled by AI characters. Hopefully the player-base will grow so I can stop feeling superior about beating limited machine intelligence to the finish line and start crying over my growing stack of losses.